The Fourth Dimension

The read through for Cold War took place in Cardiff on Wednesday, 6 June, 2012. Shooting on the episode began exactly one week later on 13 June.

David Warner plays Professor Grisenko but this isn’t his first foray into the world of Doctor Who. He provided the voice of the villainous Lord Azlok in the animated adventure Dreamland.

Piotr is heard to call Skaldak ‘Milaya moya’. This is a Russian term of affection and translates as ‘my sweet’.

‘It’s an Ice Warrior… and we go way back!’ The Doctor first encountered the Martians in the 1967 story, The Ice Warriors. They returned in 1969’s The Seeds of Death and in two Third Doctor stories during the 1970s. You can find out more about these adventures and watch clips from all of them by visiting The Ice Warriors, The Seeds of Death, The Curse of Peladon and The Monster of Peladon.

When the Doctor rattles off a list of possible reasons he could give to explain his presence to the Captain, he blurts out, ‘…no pretending to be an Earth ambassador…’ In the 1972 adventure, The Curse of Peladon, the Doctor uses this precise fiction to explain his unexpected appearance in a citadel. That story also featured the Ice Warriors and marked their return after an absence of a number of years.

The Martians seldom use the expression ‘Ice Warriors’. In fact it wasn’t until 1974 (over half a decade after their debut) in The Monster of Peladon that we hear them refer to themselves using these exact words.

The TARDIS vanishes because the Doctor had reset the HADS – a safety protocol that stands for ‘Hostile Action Displacement System’. This has only kicked in once before – back in the Second Doctor adventure, The Krotons, when the eponymous aliens tried to destroy the TARDIS. In that story the HADS ensured that the time machine simply dematerialised, effectively avoiding the intended onslaught, before reappearing at a nearby location.

The track Professor Grisenko is enjoying at the start of the episode is Vienna, a song by the British band Ultravox that reached number 2 in the UK charts back in 1981. The song he later recommends to Clara is Hungry Like the Wolf, a 1982 hit for Duran Duran.

The voice of Skaldak is provided by Nicholas Briggs whose brilliant vocal talents have brought many aliens - including Daleks, Cybermen and the Judoon – to life. The Ice Warrior – as seen in his fully-armoured state – is played by Spencer Wilding who previously appeared as the Minotaur in The God Complex and the Wooden King in the 2011Christmas special.

The exterior shots of the submerged submarine were achieved not through CGI but with the use of models created by Mike Tucker and his team. You can find out more about these sequences in our behind-the-scenes video covering the making of Cold War.

Finally, you can find out more about the truth of the historical Cold War – its origins, crisis points and element of espionage, at The Real Cold War.